IS IT POSSIBLE TO RE-WIRE YOUR APPETITE?

As any serious gym-goer will know, bulging biceps and cobblestone abs are, unquestionably, made in the kitchen.

A low carb or paleo diet are pretty good starting places, but the specific details may only apply to 25% of the population.

While you may curl, squat, press and clean to your heart's delight, a solid nutrition is what sets hard-earned muscle apart from the rest.

Inevitably, metabolism is a key player in your internal nutrition game, with countless lifters (and, admittedly, this MH staffer) constantly battling to turn their inner-body fat-burner into a calorie-torching furnace. Broadly, exercise can help make this reality, but so can your genetic profile and a personal nutrition plan.

Such is the belief of New York Times best-selling author, Robb Wolf, who thinks - rather firmly - that you can "reset" your appetite and turn your body into a blubber-burning mecca. MH decided to chop it up with Wolf to see if it's really possible to re-wire your appetite.

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Men's Health UK: What made you want to write the book?

Robb Wolf: About 3 years ago a paper got on my radar that was about brain development, brain evolution and the omnivores' real dilemma. It was making the case that if you live in this modern world of hyper palatable food, 24/7 distractions and social media, it spins the same dopamine centres of the brain as cocaine. If you find it difficult to get a handle on your nutrition and your health – that shouldn’t surprise you at all. Every single element of our modern world is set up to play against the basic genetic wiring that actually made us successful as a species up to this point...It’s just really understanding that we’re wired for a life way that’s very different from the world we live in today...the goal there is to help liberate people from this sense of guilt and morality around the challenges with diet and lifestyle change."

MH: The topline of the book is ‘How to re-wire your appetite and lose weight for good’, so what's a good approach - in your eyes - for the latter?

RW: There’s a couple of features there, one of them lay out a really nice triage process so that people can figure out where they are on a health spectrum with specific focus on their insulin sensitivity and resistance. I walk them through some really basic testing and observations ranging from taking their blood pressure to checking their waste to hip measurements and then also there’s some recommended blood work, but also paying attention to how you feel in between meals.

RW: That’s going to dictate where they drop in to the 30-day reset. The 30-day reset is a whole foods, anti-inflammatory kind of approach, that gets people back in touch with cooking and what real foods are, to normalise the neuro-regulation of your appetite, reduce information and heal the gut.

MH: What are some good examples of it working?

RW: We found 35 people at high risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease and we got them on a Paleo diet and modified their sleep and their exercise as best we could. But, based off the changes in the blood work and the health risk parameters, we estimated that the pilot study alone saved the city of Reno [where the people were based] alone about $22million [in healthcare].

MH: You also touch on ketosis - a state brought about by a low-carb diet or diabetes. How can we properly harness that?

RW: I’m a huge fan of the ketogenic diet and fasting. I’ve been looking at it for over 20 years it’s actually kind of my personal sweet spot – it’s where I feel best. And it’s so powerful for me that it created some conformation bias for a number of years and I assumed it was the best option for everybody and it took breaking some people and it took some hard learning to figure out that it’s a tool.

MH: What are the benefits?

RW: It appears that the heart, the lungs and the brain actually run more efficiently on ketone bodies. This is the fuel system that has probably been in the background of human evolution and all vertebrate evolution.

MH: How can someone 'rewire' their appetite?

RW: We have to address sleep and how much sunlight interaction we get. We clearly need to address our food, our movement, our community - which is our social connectivity - and our stress levels. All of these things interweave and govern the neuro-regulation of appetite, it influences whether a reasonable meal satisfies us and whether we’re left wanting more and more varieties of food.

MH: Where does sleep come in?

RW: I would say that sleep is far more important than the food in general, but the food ends up being the thing that many people will tackle with more gusto. Then, it’s only later that we get some buy-in, with regards to sleep, but I would argue it’s actually more important.

MH: Why are one-size-fits-all diets unrealistic?

RW: The challenge is that, when people are looking to affect a change with their diet and lifestyle, the message is really simple. The things like a low carb or paleo diet are pretty good starting places, but the specific details may only apply to 25% of the population.

Men's Health, Part of the Hearst UK Wellbeing Network
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